Truer words have not been spoken.
This has been the theme for everything they have touched in the last 5 years or more. Lets overcomplicate everything. Oh - people don't like AOS items? Lets add imbuing with a complex set of ingredients and then stack some reforging and refinements on top. I've been a crafter in this game for 15 years and still I struggle to wrap my head around all the options when want to craft something. Its literally insane.
Then our dev team wonders why we don't get new players. Can you even imagine a new player coming to this game? Its crazy. I had someone and I tried explaining loot/items/crafting and after about 30 minutes I thought his head was going to explode and now he plays an easier and more fun game.
They had a grindy, clicky game and they made it worse - its both grindy and clicky and overly complicated. Seriously. It took me a month to figure out the pet training stuff and still i'm only say intermediate at it and it takes a hella lot of time to train up a good pet. How is this fun?
I stick with it cause I have so much time and items acquired - but its really not much fun anymore. Its like a second job. The times of running around doing things with my guild are long gone. Just to craft someone a suit now takes a spreadsheet and hours of time. I mean c'mon - who wants to do that for a game?
The systems need to be simplified and it needs to be about the adventure. Instead we have the same tired dungeons and respawns while they have complicated nearly everything you do to prepare for them (training pets, making armor, digging tmaps, doing bods etc etc).
OMG - the bod revamp. Lets add a million new bods because its not bad enough there are a zillion bods for Tailor and Smith. The whole bribing and point system made the sheer number of bods irrelevant anymore so why keep it so complex? Just give us one large and 5 smalls for each profession and be done with it. Its just over the top stupid.
And you want to talk about wasting dev time - think of all the lame systems they sat around coding that has little to no impact on anything 'real' in game (like PvP or PvM) - Aquariums, Parrots, Brewing, Coffee making, Taxadermy etc. Did we need this crap? C'mon man.
I am of a different opinion, though....
While I can understand that complexity may drive away some players from Ultima Online, I still think that being a very complex and "DEEP" game adds spice and interestingness to it.... at least for me.
Sure, I DO AM intimidated by its complexity and, infact, I am having currently, as a returning player, a hard time to understand in details the ins and outs of the crafting mechanics and I have not even touched the pets' training new mechanics... I first want to understand WELL how crafting now works....
But, I have to say, having my head hurt when trying to understand how the mechanics work is also intriguing, challenging, and when (if) I will eventually get to understand how the mechanics works, it will be quite satisfactory to then be able to master it and take advantage in the game from what I learned...
I do would LOVE to have more Guides to help one get through learning, though....
Too often, Posts on topics are too concise, not enough explicative... not to mention that at times different players' Posts on the same one topic may be contradicting one another and thus, leave an inexperienced and still with limited knowledge on that one topic reader, in great difficulties on which line of thinking to follow when they cannot be both right....
So, if there were more Guides out there, and more detailed ones, from well experienced players on given topics, it would immensely help....
Take Reforging, for example, to my knowledge, there is not a well detailed Guide on Reforging as available.
Yes, there are some write ups with the mechanics of how to do it but then, when one goes through reading Posts here and there about Reforging it is possible to learn that there is quite more to Reforging and doing it right not to waste imbuing weights (especially when it comes to Resistances), to just applying some runics on some plain materials to reforge them....
Not to mention, that it is not clear to me yet how Reforging, Imbuing and Refinements can interact with one another...
Can the 500% Imbuing Weight "CAP" be exceeded through clever ways to handle Reforging and Refinements ?
Is it possible, by fine tuning Reforging and Refinements when working on adjusting Resistances to leave all or most of the Imbuing Weight at disposal of players (the 500%) on modifiers OTHER then resistances, thus to come out with a better suit ?
How ?